Sonnets to Death

            On Wednesday morning as I was setting up the lectern for Professor Weisman she noticed that there was another lectern in the room this time and that she could use both because she had a lot of paperwork for teaching Charlotte Smith’s “Beachy Head", so I put them both side by side.

            She reminded us of our test next Thursday and that it would be 50 minutes long.

            We looked at more of Smith’s sonnets.

            The high lyric form of the sonnet had been the preserve of the cultural elite of men. In the renaissance there was a profusion of sonnet sequences by men that were burning in unrequited love. Not only did she appropriate the lyric prestige of the sonnet, she also brought it back from the grave.

            What does it mean for a woman to take up a form that traditionally codes woman?

            Establishing an authoritative voice was important for Catherine Smith, even though she needed money.

            The professor read Smith’s poem “Written in the Churchyard at Middleton in Sussex" and then she asked us to summarize it.

            I said that in the very first line she personifies the Moon as female and indicates that it is the Moon that initiates the invasion of the sea into the graves and the sweeping of the human bones over the beach, just as it was a woman that wrote that initiated the event by writing a poem about it. She humanizes the Moon but dehumanizes the human bones by scattering them on the beach among the seashells. She seems to imply that it is this depersonalization that had given the pieces of skeletons the peace that she herself craves.

            There is a Gothic tinge to this poem.

            Smith’s prefaces to her books emphasized her own sad history and her sorrow. She was a woman in desperate straits. Her husband was not nice but she does not come out and say that she divorced him because that would lower her social standing.

            She is writing about beach erosion and the continual encroachments of the sea.

            This is not an abstraction about nature. She knows real places and spaces and has a ground of real experience. This is not a pastoral, recuperative poem. The context cannot be escaped because of the footnotes being part of the composition. The reader is encouraged to make contact with the poet.

            We looked at the poem “To Night”. Again a woman poet is addressing a female figure of the personified night and the relationship is unrequited.

            She again envies the dead in suggesting that perhaps she will have consolation in heaven and laments for the living.

            I suggested that while the traditional sonnet abstracted women out of existence, Smith’s personified abstraction of impersonal elements such as the Moon and the night had the opposite effect and abstracts them into existence. Professor Weisman said that the way in which Smith personifies the Moon or the night is traditional and so she doesn’t add anything new to them.

            As I was getting ready to leave I asked the professor how Smith had the time to observe nature, to be well read and to write poetry too when she had twelve children. The professor told me that not all of Smith’s children survived.

On my way home from class I decided to swing by 14 Division to report last week’s accident. The reception desk looked abandoned but behind it was a window wall and an officer at a desk behind it came to find out what I wanted. It certainly wasn’t a warm reception. He didn’t understand why I was reporting an accident that I’d already reported on the phone. I told him that I was told somebody would call me. He said that my report would not go through 14 Division and that I should go to the police traffic services building at 9 Hanna. It’s been a few years since I’ve visited Liberty Village. I kept hearing how great it is down there but found that it’s still not a village and it's still ugly. I had a hell of a time finding 9 Hanna because it's not even on Hanna. The back of it is down an alley north of 5 Hanna but the front is south and east of 5 Hanna. What a crazy area! Once again there was no cop at reception but a guy at a desk behind a window and he didn’t even get up when he saw me but called, “Can I help you?” from his desk. It turns out that I’d been misdirected by 14 Division because they don’t handle accident reports at 9 Hanna. He gave me a phone number to call.

            After lunch of one piece of toast with peanut butter and another with tomato and cheese I called the number. I was on hold and talked to someone who transferred me to another department and I was on hold for half an hour. The person I’d spoken to said that they had tried to call me twice, but I hadn’t seen anything but 800 numbers when the phone rang. He said they would call me again and after about half an hour they did. A female cop took down my info but told me that I would have to call 14 Division in a few days even though that's where I went in the first place. She told me that I shouldn’t have asked for and accepted money from the guy that doored me because now he could say that an arrangement had been made. 

            That night I had an egg with toast and a beer and watched Peter Gunn. This story begins with a middle-aged man named Henry rigging the wiring in his basement and then flooding it. When his wife comes downstairs and steps in the water she is electrocuted. Later at Mother’s Edie is singing “Straight to Baby” by Henry Mancini, Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. Two wealthy sisters named Wilma and Irma walk in with their elderly and nerdish lawyer, whose name happens to be James Bond. They want Gunn to investigate Henry who is recently married to their sister Maggie. They think that he is after her money and might even kill her for it. Gunn goes to a restaurant where Henry and Maggie are dining and situates himself so that when he pays the club’s camera girl to take his own photograph, Maggie and Henry are in the shot. He takes the picture to a poker game full of shady characters and passes it around. None of the guys recognize Henry but one of them thinks Maggie is Detroit Dottie while another is sure that she’s Dixie Maddox the dealer. Finally it’s the straightest looking player who tells Gunn that the guy in the picture is Elmer Deagan whom he spent four years in Leavenworth with. He was in for blackmail. The guy he’s just beaten out of a large pot asks, “What were you in for?” He answers, “Gamblin on Sunday!”

            Gunn confirms through the police that Henry has done some time and lets the sisters know but he argues that everyone deserves a second chance. Wilma tells him to mind his own business and she tells Maggie that she won’t get a penny of her father’s money as long as she’s married to Henry.  Later Wilma gets into the family’s ancient car, which I think is a 1916 Baker upright electric. 

            As Wilma leaves the property and goes onto the street the wheel begins to come loose but the brakes don’t work. The car flips on its side and Wilma is killed. Gunn investigates the car and sees that the wheel and the brakes had been tampered with. He demands that Henry either meet him at Mother’s to talk about it or he would call the police. Henry agrees to meet him but that night as Gunn is parking in front of Mother’s he sees that he is in front of a hydrant and so he backs up. Just then a Molotov cocktail comes don from the roof across the street and explodes in front of Gunn’s car. Shortly after that Henry arrives in a cab. Gunn finds out from the police that Henry has been questioned in five different cities about the accidental death of five different wives. When Gunn is telling Maggie this they get a call that her sister Irma has died from gas asphyxiation in her bedroom. Maggie tells Gunn that she’s going to go to Reno and get a divorce but he follows her and it’s just a ruse. After she thinks she’s shaken her tail she arrives at a little house where she meets Henry, but Gunn has followed her there. He confronts Henry but it’s Maggie who pulls a gun. She admits that it was her who killed her sisters and who tried to bomb Gunn. Knowing that Gunn is the only one who can testify that he didn’t murder Wilma and Irma and so Henry changes his tone and calls Maggie stupid. She turns her gun to Henry and fires but misses. He grabs a lamp to throw at her but forgets that he’d rigged it to electrocute Maggie and he dies. Maggie says she knew he would kill her but maybe not today and it was the happiest she’d ever been. Gunn tells her she’ll probably get placed in a hospital and she admits that she’s ill. He asks how she knows about cars and Molotov cocktails and she says that she spent her whole life reading.

            Maggie was played by Jeanette Nolan who worked extensively in the golden age of radio and appeared on more than 300 TV shows. She was nominated for four Emmy awards.

            Wilma was played by Helen Wallace.

            Irma was plated by character actor Ellen Corby who had a long career and was even nominated for an Oscar but didn’t become well known until her role as Grandma Walton.